About
Updated August 15, 2024
Overview
The Southwest Shadow was founded in January 2010 and strives to provide an accessible news source for students, parents and the outlying community of Las Vegas. We are proud members of NSPA, JEA, CSPA, and Quill & Scroll.
The Southwest Shadow operates as a public open forum that provides information and entertainment, and viewpoints on debatable issues in the form of editorials and columns. The content of the Southwest Shadow is determined by, and reflects only the views of, the student staff and is not endorsed by school officials, the school itself, or the Clark County School District. Prior review is not in practice at Southwest Career and Technical Academy.
The mission of the Southwest Shadow is simple: Post news that is relevant to our school and the local community. If it is not relevant, then we are not accomplishing our goals.
The Southwest Shadow makes every effort to publish new content daily. Regular daily posting for the 2025 school year will begin on September 3, 2024. Production is modified during Fall Break (November 18-22), Winter Break (December 20 – January 6) and Spring Break (March 14 – March 24). The final regular postings for the 2025 school year will be April 30.
In-depth storytelling is important to the mission of our publication, but with a small staff, these stories do take a long time to produce. Because of this, our goal for the 2024 school year is to post one each semester.
For the 2024 school year, a staff of 32 will be enrolled in Journalism II to produce the Southwest Shadow online news site. Of the 32 staff members, 16 are new to the program.
Because of the structure and purpose of a career and technical school, students are automatically enrolled in a series of courses that count towards their selected program area. These classes are counted as elective courses, which means that students have minimal opportunities in their schedules to take additional electives, such as journalism. For a student to enroll in journalism, this may mean they are completing a foreign language or art course online, in addition to their normal eight classes. Finally, several program classes are only offered once within the A/B block schedule, so they are unable to enroll in journalism if their program area class conflicts with the journalism class period. We do what we do with a small staff and if the circumstances were different, we would have a larger staff, based on student interest and requests.
After starting The Shadow Files last year, Travis McGinnis will have five additional members of his team for 2025. The team’s goal is to complete a new video story every two weeks, if not more. We hope you continue to enjoy this new content.
We thank our Video Production program, Rout(e) 131, for providing us with the daily announcements to post to our site.
Please note: SWCTA does not offer NCAA sanctioned sports. We have chosen to allow sports to be covered in-depth by the local city newspapers who have the resources and manpower to visit the outlying comprehensive high schools with those programs.
For any additional information, please contact adviser Mr. Matthew LaPorte.
